Yehuda Vach
 Yehuda Vach  (military officer) | |
|---|---|
 "Every Palestinian is a terrorist" | |
Yehuda Vach is a Brigadier General in the Israel Defence Force and commands the 252nd Division. He is a settler from Kiryat Arba, possibly the most extreme of all Israel’s West Bank settlements. For many years, Vach headed the military’s officers training school, passing on his extreme views to a new generation of officers, presumably some of whom are now making decisions in Gaza.[1]
On 18 December 2024, Israel's Haaretz newspaper reported that soldiers in Division 252 had been engaged in arbitrary killings and rampant lawlessness in Gaza's Netzarim Corridor. One of Vach's officers recounted how, after Hamas’ military leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in October, Vach held an official meeting to determine what to do with his body. He wanted to strip Sinwar’s corpse naked, put it in a public square, dismember it and pour sewage over the remains.
In an address to soldiers, Vach is reported to have echoed a genocidal view widely shared in Israel, that "there are no innocents in Gaza”. Even Israel’s supposedly liberal President Isaac Herzog has said as much.
But according to one officer, Vach has made this view an “operational doctrine”. Vach’s view of Palestinians is that “everyone's a terrorist". And that means, given Israel’s current, explicit aims in Gaza, everyone must be killed.[2]
